Boston Flora

Category: Author Book Signing

  • Monday, March 21, 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm – Growing a Garden City

    So perhaps you’ve never heard of Jeremy Smith or his lovely book Growing a Garden City. You have, however, probably heard of Jane Goodall–she of the chimps and her eponymous Institute that focuses on sustainability education around the world. It turns out that Jane Goodall has heard of Jeremy Smith and, in fact, liked his book so much that she had the following to say about it: “I love this book. It proves that every one of us, and every patch of soil, can make a difference. The way we connect with nature, with our food, and with each other can change the world.”

    Not too shabby, huh? Growing a Garden City describes the efforts of regular folks in Missoula, Montana to use local agriculture to not only make their town more sustainable but also more of a true community.

    Given that many people in and around Boston are undertaking similar efforts, Slow Food Boston is  delighted to have the opportunity to host Jeremy on Monday March 21st  at Voltage Coffee & Art in Kendall Square. The program will be more lecture than reading as Jeremy provides practical advice from the book and his experiences about how all of us can follow in Missoula’s footsteps. Several folks from The Food Project will also be joining us to discuss their efforts here in Boston. The event will begin at 6PM and run for approximately 90 minutes. The cost will be $5, paid in advance please, by logging on to www.slowfoodboston.com/events, where you will also find directions to Voltage.

  • Saturday, March 12, 2:00 pm – The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle

    Smashing through the Arctic Ocean with the crew of a Russian icebreaker, herding reindeer across the tundra with Lapps, and shadowing the Trans-Alaskan pipeline with truckers—author Sara Wheeler will discuss her adventures in the beautiful and brutal Arctic from her book The Magnetic North, featured in the Boston Globe and the February 6 edition of the New York Times Book Review. The lecture and book signing will take place at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, 26 Oxford Street, beginning at 2 pm on Saturday, March 12. Free with museum admission.  For more information log on to www.hmnh.harvard.edu.

  • Saturday, March 19, 9:30 am – 12:30 pm – Gardening for the Birds

    Join Stephen Kress, author of The Audubon Society Guide to Attracting Birds and Vice President for Bird Conservation for the National Audubon Society, for a lively presentation on desirable gardening practices-from a bird’s viewpoint.  An expert in seabird conservation, Kress successfully led Audubon’s Project Puffin in Maine. He is also an associate at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology where he teaches a Field Ornithology course. He will explain bird-plant interactions and suggest landscaping options for creating enticing and safe habitats. He’ll provide solutions for reducing bird encounters with windows and cats, as well as some tactics for preventing the spread of avian diseases. He will also share tips for learning to recognize common backyard birds by sight and song. His book will be available for purchase and signing. $40 for ELA, WCFH members, Audubon Society members and Arnold Arboretum members, $48 for non-members. Registrations are limited – call 617-436-5838, or email ela.info@comcast.net. This Saturday, March 19 event is offered in collaboration with the Arnold Arboretum, Boston Nature Center, Grow Native Massachusetts/Cambridge, and Wellesley College Friends of Horticulture, and will take place from 9:30 am – 12:30 pm in the Hunnewell Building of the Arnold Arboretum, 125 The Arborway, Boston.

  • Wednesday, March 16 – Sunday, March 20 – The Boston Flower & Garden Show

    Leave behind the gray days of winter and rejoice in the 2011 show, entitled A Burst of Color: Celebrating the Container Garden. Boston’s biggest horticultural happening provides the tools and inspiration to kick off the season in style.  Hours are 9 am – 8 pm Wednesday, March 16 through Saturday, March 19 and 9 am – 6 pm on Sunday, March 20.   A complete schedule of lectures and demonstrations will be posted at www.thebostonflowershow.com, but some highlights include a talk by Tovah Martin on The New Terrarium, a lecture by Ellen Ecker Ogden  on The Complete Kitchen Garden, and a charmingly entitled “Growing Your Groceries in Containers” by Teresa O’Connor and Jayme Jenkins.   The show plays host to amateur competitions as well, coordinated by The Massachusetts Horticultural Society along with The Garden Club Federation of Massachusetts.

  • Saturday, March 5, 2:00 pm – At Home in the 365-Day Garden

    On the last day of 2007, Margaret Roach made the life-altering decision to walk away from New York City and her job as EVP/Editorial Director of Martha Stewart, a career many would describe as highly successful. But she craved completely different rewards: solitude, a return to the personal creativity of writing, and a closer connection to nature and her first passion, the garden she had been making on weekends for 20 years. She moved to a rural New York State town of 300, began AWayToGarden.com (called “the best garden blog” by The New York Times and named for her prize-winning 1989 book), and wrote her dropout memoir, And I Shall Have Some Peace There. On Saturday, March 5, beginning at 2 pm, Ms. Roach will discuss how you can have a visually exciting landscape every day of the year – if you know what to plant, and also (just as important) how to “see”. As on her website, she’ll deliver both “horticultural how-to and woo-woo”, encouraging not only the smart use of great plants but also an intimate connection between the gardener and the garden, even in its most subtle moments. Copies of And I Shall Have Some Peace There will be available for purchase and signing after the lecture. The program will take place at Tower Hill Botanic Garden, 11 French Drive in Boylston, and there is a $15 charge for THBG members, $20 for non-members. For more information, and to register, log on to www.towerhillbg.org.

  • Thursday, March 3, 8:00 am – 8:30 pm – 17th Annual ELA Conference and Eco-Marketplace

    ELA brings together all of the essential information on rain gardens that really work, healthy soils for healthy trees, plant choices for food productive landscapes, and more at the 17th Annual ELA Conference and Eco-Marketplace on Thursday, March 3 from 8 am – 8:30 pm. Co-hosted by the Association of Professional Landscape Designers, New England Wild Flower Society, NOFA Organic Land Care Program, Society for Ecological Restoration, New England Chapter, and the Ecological Landscaping Association. Panelists include William Cullina, Dr. Peter Del Tredici, and Jono Neiger, three leading experts in the field of plant selection, who will share their unique perspectives on Native, Introduced, Invasive, and Endangered Plants in the Landscape: Untangling the Roots of the Problem. Visit www.ecolandscaping.org for online registration, or call Penny Lewis at 617-436-5838. The conference will take place at the MassMutual Center in Springfield. Rooms at the Sheraton Springfield Monarch Place Hotel are available to participants for $109/night. Complete package (not including hotel) for members of one of the sponsors is $170 before 2/15, $225 after 2/15; non members $190/$245.

  • Wednesday, March 30, 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm – Working with Stone: Creating a Connection with the Spirit of Place

    Rescheduled from February 1 due to snow. The gardener’s perspective is the perfect loci for seeking inward and reaching outward, for ordering the experience of time and space, and observing higher orders.  Dan Snow is a designer of outdoor spaces in stone, and an art maker specializing is dry stone constructions.  He is the author of In the Company of Stone and Listening to Stone—Hardy Structures, Perilous Follies, and Other Tangles with Nature and the subject of the PBS documentary Stone Rising.  Working solo to build garden walls and dry stone features, Master Craftsman Dan Snow finds that the most successful designs are born of an intimate relationship with the landscape and knowledge and understanding of the materials at hand. Dan’s presentation will examine the many uses of stone in the garden; how stone can support a garden design, or simply be the garden itself. Illustrated with images of his work, the presentation will also explore the “give and take” experience of working in nature, and the connection to spirit expressed through stone.  Book-signing to follow. Co-sponsored by Trinity Church and the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University.

    The lecture and reception will now take place Wednesday, March 30, beginning at 7 pm. Tickets $20 member, $25 non member, available at The Shop at Trinity (206 Clarendon Street, lower level), by phone (617.536.0944 x225) or online arboretum.harvard.edu. Questions: Kathy Acerbo-Bachmann, 617.536.0944 x217 or kacerbobachmann@trinitychurchboston.org.  The beautiful photo below of Dan Snow’s work in Vermont is by Peter Mauss.

  • Saturday, February 19, 1:30 pm – Nature Revisited

    The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s Landscape Visions Lectures continue Saturday, February 19, beginning at 1:30 pm in the Kotzen Meeting Center, Lefavour Hall, Simmons College, with Amale Andraos, co-founder of WORKac, NYC, speaking on Nature Revisited.

    Today, in the face of global urbanization, exploding population, and shrinking resources, architecture, cities, and nature are at a crossroads. Moving beyond the binary—white or green, architecture or landscape, urban or rural—we must ask how we can reinvent nature for the twenty-first century. Andraos examines recent projects by WORKac that shed light on the current situation and suggest a new course for the future.

    Based in New York City, WORKac develops architectural and urban projects that engage culture and consciousness, nature and artificiality, surrealism and pragmatism. WORKac is involved in projects at all scales, ranging from a master plan for the new BAM cultural district in Brooklyn, to a single family villa in Inner Mongolia, China. Recent completed projects include the installation ‘Public Farm 1’ at PS1/MoMA and the new headquarters for Diane von Furstenberg. Current work includes the new Kew Gardens Hills Library in Queens, the extension of the Clark Art Institute at Mass MoCA, a new Children’s Museum for the Arts, and the first Edible Schoolyard New York City with Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse Foundation.

    Amale Andraos is a visiting professor at Princeton University’s School of Architecture and has taught at numerous institutions including Harvard and Columbia Universities, the University of Pennsylvania, Parsons School of Design, and the American University in Beirut. She was born in Beirut, Lebanon. She has lived in Saudi Arabia, France, Canada and the Netherlands prior to moving to New York in 2002. She currently serves on the Architectural League of New York’s Board of Directors.  Tickets ($15 general public, $12 seniors, $5 members, students free) are available on line at www.gardenermuseum.org.  You will also find directions to the Kotzen Meeting Center on the site.

  • Saturday, February 19, 2:00 pm – At Home in the 365-Day Garden

    Berkshire Botanical Garden presents noted author Margaret Roach on Saturday, February 19, (snow date February 20) 2 pm, at Monument Mountain Regional High School, Great Barrington, MA, for the 2011 Winter Lecture, “At Home in the 365-Day Garden.”

    Margaret will discuss her own gardening journey – highlighting personal experiences leading to the creation of a beautiful, year-round landscape. She will present slides of plants and vistas of her own inspirational garden to illustrate her approach to making a non-stop, year-round garden along with sprinklings of her unique and irreverent sense of humor. This is a wonderful opportunity to meet the woman behind the highly successful garden blog, Awaytogarden.com, where she provides informative posts, photos, links, and whimsical meanderings from her 2.3 acre zone 5B garden in the neighboring Hudson Valley.

    This lecture also marks the debut of Margaret’s memoir, And I Shall Have Some Peace There, documenting her transition from working at high-powered jobs in Manhattan, (Martha Stewart Living, New York Times, Newsday), to living full time in the country, reinventing her life, and creating a 365-day garden. A recent gold-star rating by Kirkus Reviews describes And I Shall Have Some Peace There as “a moving, eloquent and joyously idiosyncratic memoir.” A reception and book signing will follow the lecture.

    Proceeds from the Winter Lecture support Berkshire Botanical Garden’s popular Horticulture Certificate Program and other Education Programs, which provide hands-on workshops and classes to children and adults year-round. Additional information on education programs can be obtained through the Garden’s web site, www.berkshirebotanical.org.

    Tickets to the lecture are: $35 Garden Members / $42 non-members, and group discounts are available. Seating is limited and reservations are required. For more information and to reserve tickets, call Berkshire Botanical Garden at 413 298 3926, or visit the web site, www.berkshirebotanical.org.

  • Saturday, January 8, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm – Wachusett: How Boston’s 19th Century Quest for Water Changed Four Towns and a Way of Life

    The Garden Club of the Back Bay’s program theme this year, “Water, Water Everywhere, and Not a Drop to Drink,” could have inspired author Eamon McCarty Earls and his presentation at Tower Hill Botanic Garden, 11 French Drive, Boylston, Massachusetts on Saturday, January 8, from 1 pm – 2 pm.  He will discuss his new book on the history of Wachusett Reservoir – Wachusett: How Boston’s 19th Century Quest for Water Changed Four Towns and a Way of Life.  Mr. Earls became interested in the Wachusett Reservoir after a visit a few years ago and began his research when he learned there wasn’t really too much else published about it.  He mined information in local historical societies and libraries, and the result is this interesting and very readable book.  Please join the Tower Hill staff as he discusses his work and shares some of the maps and images in the Tower Hill Library (which overlooks Wachusett Reservoir, as it happens.)  Copies of the book will be available for purchase.  The program is free with admission, and there is a snow date of January 22.  For directions and more information, log on to www.towerhillbg.org.